If you were taught by liberal professors,
you’ve probably heard the injunction “Respect
the culture of others.” Different countries, different
customs; varied economic classes, likewise. Urban people
are likely to have different ways of living than those
in rural areas, Western Europe more progressive than Eastern.
Don’t cross your legs in Thailand because Thais
are disgusted by the bottoms of people’s shoes.
Don’t shake hands with Japanese or use your hands
to signal. There are big exceptions to this role of toleration.
Some cultural mores are so out of tune with what rational
people should can accept that outside forces would do
well to correct them. The British outlawed sutee in India,
a custom in which a widow would immolate herself on a
funeral pyre after the death of her husband. Stoning in
Iran, such as that exhibited by the excellent film The
Stoning of Sonya M is beneath contempt, not only
for its barbarism but for the “crime” of the
accused which could be adultery, or even the thought that
the victim is an adulteress.

Abdullah Oguz’s marvelous Turkish
film Bliss, adapted from Zulfu Livaneli’s
best-selling novel and scripted by Kubilay Tuncer, Elif
Ayan, and Abdullah Oguz, deals with the subject of honor
killing, a practice used in remote villages in Eastern
Turkey though foreign to Istanbul. When a woman is raped,
notwithstanding the fact that she has been forced, she
is unclean and must be killed to restore the honor of
the family. Sick, eh? But what you’re reading here
is only words. Mutluluk, as the film is called
in its original Turkish language (bold, clear English
subtitles are a welcome addition), explores the nature
of this bestial code, but goes beyond that. Bliss
deals not just with a seventeen-year-old girl from the
sticks of Eastern Turkey and the cousin who wants her
dead to restore honor; the film also explores the lives
of three people, all of whom are alienated from the lives
they’d been living, and looking for a way out.

Bliss is not only the title
of the movie: viewing it is a positively blissful experience,
a must-see that affords the audience a look at Turkey’s
scenic topography, the clash of customs between city and
village, between Asian and Europe, and between the educated
and the unenlightened. It’s comic and sad, melodramatic
and tragic, the ensemble putting their all into the story
to give it the gravitas and the lightness it so well deserves.

Bliss will have cineastes comparing
it to Roman Polanski’s 1962 film Knife in the
Water, given that much of the action takes place
on a yacht. Seventeen-year-old Meryem (Ozgu Namal) is
found unconscious, returns to her rickety village home
of her father, Tahsin (Emin Gursoy), a victim of rape
who refuses (until a dramatic turn of events near the
conclusion) to name her attacker. Urged by her wicked
stepmother (Sebnem Kostem) to hang herself in order to
“go to heaven,” she decides to live. When
Tahsin’s cousin, Ali Riza Amca (Mustafa Avkiran),
notes that her “crime” calls for her to be
killed to restore family honor, he arranges for his son
Cemal (Murat Han) to escort the girl to Istanbul and throw
her over a balcony on the way. While backing down from
his “duty,” Cemal falls under the influence
of his old friend Yakup, a city mouse, who condemns hick
customs. When Irfan (Talat Bulut) hires Cemal to assist
him on his yacht, a fondness for the girl grows with both
men. In the meantime, the bad guys from village are hot
on their trail.

Even a potential audience that looks
with horror on foreign-language films could find much
that rewards. This is both a mainstream film and arthouse
fare, a movie with believable, if stereotypical, characters,
all effecting changes in their lives. The white-haired
and bearded Irfan has walked out on his sophisticated
wife, disgusted with the bourgeois-intellectual customs
of the clan. Cemal is torn between his obligations to
kill the girl and his growing love for her. Meryem, casting
off the fear of being killed, asserts herself and despite
her second-grade education it seem she just might find
a home in Istanbul.

This is a moving film that could benefit
the Turkish Tourist Board as well as cineastes. Tebrikler!

Think of Joe Berlinger’s Crude
not as a documentary—a word that strikes fear and
loathing in the souls of entertainment-seekers who believe
that fiction is always more entertainment than truth and
who’d sooner see a movie starring Paris Hilton than
anything that features talking heads. Think of this film
instead as something from the pen of John Grisham, with
themes like "Whites brutalize an oppressed minority"
(A Time to Kill), “Characters enjoy their
newfound wealth” (The Firm), "Oil
tycoon drills in a Louisiana swamp endangering life"
(The Pelican Brief), or "A huge corporation
defends itself against a plaintiff who develops lung cancer"
(The Runaway Jury). Crude is as riveting
and entertaining as anything found in Grisham, and what’s
more the events portrayed during the writer-director’s
600 hours of film really took place in an area that few
Americans are familiar with; namely, the rainforests of
Ecuador.

There is one big difference between
Grisham and Berlinger. Grisham, arguably the most financially
successful living writer in America, sides with the little
guy—who often wins nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory
against soulless corporations. Berlinger tackles a tale
that would make anyone in the audience to the left of
Attila the Hun vote a big award for the besieged plaintiffs,
little guys all. Yet the writer-director-producer avoids
Michael Moore-style agitprop in favor of a balanced treatment.
Yes, Virginia, even mega-business interests have a side
that’s worth considering, but to be more exact,
the company gets only about fifteen percent of the time
of this film.

Writer-director Joe Berlinger has his
camera crew follow the action from Quito, Ecuador to several
villages that serve as homes for the 30,000 indigenous
people in the Amazon jungle; then on to New York, San
Francisco, and London among the wide spectrum of areas
globally. The case against Chevron is that when the mega-energy
company was in Ecuador at the behest of that country’s
pro-American government, the workers spilled humongous
amounts of toxic waste into the waters and soil of the
Amazon. As a result, the cancer rate among the native
populations soared, drinking water dried up, and some
of the indigenous people had to rely on canned tuna fish
(ugh) because the deadly waters could not support fish
life.

Pablo Fajardo serves as lead attorney
for the plaintiffs, i.e. the 30,000 locals in this class-action
suit, a handsome compact man who is ultimately given ink
by Vanity Fair magazine and invited to a Sting concert
for the environment at Giant Stadium. Agents of the corporation,
which for some reason I could not fathom had urged the
case to be moved from the U.S. to Ecuador, hold that the
cancer rate did not actually increase, but most of all
that since Chevron was nationalized in 1992 to become
the state-owned PetroEcuador, any spills that occurred
were PetroEcuador’s responsibility since Chevron
had done the needed clean-up before leaving the country.
Moreover, defendant argues that the government of Ecuador
had freed Chevron of all legal responsibility for the
sludge. The company further holds that the plaintiffs
are in it for the money. (One wonders: if Chevron ever
has to cough up $27 billion in remediation fees, which
is recommended by one official who has pored over the
facts, do the plaintiff lawyers get $9 billion? If so,
Chevron may have a point.)

Steven Donziger serves as consulting
attorney, an American who speaks fluent Spanish albeit
with a Yankee accent. He serves as liaison, in one instance
setting up a visit by three members of the local population
to come to the U.S. for the shareholders’ meeting
at Chevron to tell their story.

Politically the case takes a turn for
the plaintiffs when Rafael Correa, a leftist who would
presumably never allow a U.S. corporation to corrupt the
Ecuadorian environment as allegedly did Chevron, is elected
by 67% of the populace. Some Americans fret that all South
America could turn socialist, as Correa joins Hugo Chavez
in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, who could make
decisions against the interests of American corporate
power.

Behind the cameras, Pocho Alvarez, Joe
Berligner, and Michael Bonfiglio give us armchair travelers
a taste of life in the Ecuadorian Amazon free from the
heat, humidity and mosquitoes. This is a well-researched
documentary with bold English subtitles, the filmmakers
seeming to know where each of the major actions will take
place.

Based on J.M. Coetzee’s beloved
Booker Prize winning novel, Disgrace taps into
the dark, dangerous and, often, destructive side of human
nature—specifically the nature of MALE desire and
does so in a painfully honest and fearless manner.

John Malkovich delivers an intricate
and bold performance as David Lurie, an English professor
in South Africa who brazenly seduces a student (an indifferent
Antoinette Engel) and proceeds to pursue her long after
she is interested. (Although I was never convinced she
was interested and his pursuit seemed to tow the date
rape line.)

When the powers-that-be discover his
proclivities and demand an explanation, Lurie refuses
and simply states he is guilty. Showing no remorse, he
is forced to resign and journeys to a remote Eastern Cape
farm to stay with his lesbian daughter, Lucy (Jessica
Haines). Father and daughter are about as different as
two people can be and soon a vicious attack by three young
local boys throws their lives into a frenzy where the
aftershocks of post-Apartheid South Africa is explored
with incredulity and injustice seemingly winning the day.

Disgrace is quite a complex
film and has its share of flaws, including the above mentioned
lack of a clear presentation of the relationship between
Lurie and his student. Also, after the film’s emotionally
devastating turn, we aren't privy enough to the reasons
behind Lucy’s desire to stay where she is. Anna-Maria
Monticelli’s crisp script could have been more nuanced
and Steve Jacobs mostly-impressive direction might have
benefited from less meandering.

What really makes Disgrace
worth seeing are the two central performances. Malkovich
truly shows us a man who lets his sexual nature overtake
him. He is self-aware and unapologetic and that is as
refreshing as it is outrageously offensive. When his daughter
becomes a victim of a similar type of male sexual dominance,
he is forced to examine himself and his own actions. And
the affair he has with an older animal shelter vet (a
terrific Fiona Press) is paradoxical and fascinating.

But the film’s beacon is newcomer
Jessica Haines. She is simply brilliant. It’s impossible
to believe this is her first feature. Haines allows us
to see all the fear, pain and loathing—self and
otherwise--in such subtle and sublime ways. It’s
a brave turn--never showy, always penetrating--and deserves
award recognition. Haines is so emotionally raw and engaging
that she transcends the symbolic nature of her character
and reaches a powerful, profound and human level onscreen
that is a wonder to behold.

If your favorite food
is prawns, those nice, juicy, ugly crustaceans stir-fried
in a wok with a combinations of mysterious sauces, be
sure to go to lunch before you see District 9.
Afterwards you may decide to get scallops instead, because
the prawns in this movie are ten feet tall and they’re
big, ugly, black-liquid spewing characters. They don’t
act so nice either, but that’s not their fault:
they’ve been marginalized to say the least, thrown
into a ghetto called District 9 where they are to have
no contact with human beings—forever. There is
much in director Neill Blomkamp’s vision that
is allegorical. One suspects that without the political
commentary, there would be nothing to the story.

Notwithstanding the political
implications, which are a none-too-subtle aspect of
the script which the director co-wrote with Terri Tatchell,
District 9 is neither particularly original
nor in any way gripping. There is no real character
development, not even for the principal fellow who has
the most direct contact with the aliens which are called
prawns by the humans, nor does Blomkamp’s tale
provide suspense. That being the case, there is no-one
in the picture to care about, nor are we successfully
prompted to have empathy or sympathy for the creatures
despite the hard luck that finds them fish out of water,
so to speak, desiring nothing more than to go home.

Neill Blomkamp, born
in South Africa and now living in Canada, situates the
picture in the land of his birth, in and around Johannesburg,
a large city that finds slum dwellers able to look out
upon the skyscrapers housing businesses that do nothing
to advance their comfort. A space ship arrives there
(perhaps the only original idea in the movie in that
most space ships tend to favor Roswell, New Mexico),
runs out of gas, and remains suspended for twenty years
above Jo’Burg, its inhabitants separated from
the human community behind the barbed wire of District
9. They’re not really prawns, but that’s
what the humans call them because of their appearance
and the belief that they are bottom-feeders—though
they like cat food rather than crabs. The aliens need
a black liquid to get their ship moving and to power
weapons that they can use in their defense. Obesandjo
(Eugene Khumbanyiwa), who heads a Nigerian mafia, wants
to get at these wepons.

When Wikus (Sharlto Copey)
becomes infected with a prawn virus that changes his
DNA, first observed when he loses some teeth and fingernails
but grows a claw to replace an arm, Obesandjo orders
his fellow criminals to cut off the man’s arm
so that he can eat it and develop the ability to harness
the power of the aliens’ weaponry.

Sharlto Copey dominates
the proceedings, a man on the run from the alien self
that he is becoming and from the scientists in an organizations
known as MNU who want to harvest his organs, thereby
enabling them to utilize advanced weaponry. He allies
himself with Christopher (Jason Cope), a prawn, and
Christiopher’s young son, pursued by Koobus (David
James), who looks like Jason Stratham and seeks to kill
Wikus.

The movie opens as a
mock-doc, talking heads discussing the nature of the
ship that hovers over the city’s landscape, with
actual archival film to show crowd scenes. Trent Opaloch’s
mini-cameras take us into the heart of the action in
such a way that we think that the cameraman is himself
running from both prawns and humans.

The action takes place
over a period of seventy-four hours, the time needed
for Wikus to develop a full-scale claw and for Clinton
Shorter’s music to hit the soundtrack with effectively
scary tones. As a buddy picture and road movie, District
9 encapsulates the dilemma of apartheid, a system
of government in South Africa that once allowed fifteen
percent of whites to dominate eighty-five percent of
blacks. In a broader sense, this is an allegory of what
humans beings have done to other human beings since
time immemorial. While the point is made to anyone in
the audience who paid attention to the moralizing of
their middle-school teachers, the movie presents a stream
of events involving people who mean nothPhase 4 Films
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Kartening to those
of us who sat through the film in a merely dutiful way.

In the opening chapter
of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, writer
Paul Theroux notes an experience in “an Irish
pub where refugees from Ulster swore obscenely at the
TV whenever they saw Prince Charles on it, and laughed
like morons the day Lord Mountbatten was blown up by
the IRA.” The British are not particularly loved
by the Catholic population of Northern Ireland, nor
will you hear Kumbaya sung by the province’s Protestants
in harmony with its Catholics. The Protestants form
a majority of the semi-autonomous land, generally wanting
to remain part of The United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland. The Catholics generally want to
be free from British “protection.”

Judging from recent movies
about what’s called The Troubles—that is,
the friction between the two religious/political factions—there
are several ways to tell the story of The Troubles.
One, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, is a mostly
meditative focus on Bobby Sands, a great hero to the
Catholics, who died slowly and voluntarily by starvation
to protest British hegemony—thereby leading to
worldwide riots in his support. Another, Oliver Herschbiegel’s
Five Minutes of Heaven, is a mostly chamber
piece, a theatrical, melodramatic look at a confrontation
between the brother of a murdered man and his killer,
thirty-three years after the commission of the crime.
Scheduled to open to same day as the latter film, Kari
Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking, is
neither meditative nor stagy but a knock-down, drag-out
thriller based, like the two aforementioned products,
on a true story. This one features a confused and rootless
young man who joined and was trusted by the radical
Irish Republic Army only to sell out the organization
and become a hero to the British by acting as an informer.
According to the British agent who used the fellow as
an operative, he saved at least fifty lives by preventing
planned occurrences of terrorism.

Then again as we’ve
often heard, one man’s terrorist is another’s
freedom-fighter, but this IRA turncoat, or “tout,”
as informers were called by the organization, seems
so naive that he’s not even sure of what the IRA
does. He seems not political at all, forming a bond
with the British agent for reasons other than disillusionment.

Filled with bloody fighting,
point-blank assassinations and gruesome torture by hitmen,
Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking features
a magnificent performance by Jim Sturgess (21,
Across the Universe) as Martin McGartland
who, in the opening scene somewhere in Canada in 1999
is shot several times point-blank while defrosting the
window of his car. He puts up a terrific fight with
his ski-masked assailant, an indication of the indomitable
spirit he displays throughout. Back to West Belfast
in the 1980’s, McGartland, daring a British policeman
to shoot him, then running away, is a petty thief, trying
to drum up business in the neighborhood selling dresses
to less-than-enthusiastic women. Recruited by a high-level
member of the IRA, he appears to have taken up an offer
by British agent Fergus (Sir Ben Kingsley) to pass information
to the other side in return for money, a job for the
first time in his life which enables him to get a car
and a nice apartment for him and his now-pregnant girlfriend
Lara (Natalie Press). As IRA agents become suspicious,
tension mounts for both the operative and us in the
audience, a tension furthered beautifully by Ben Mink’s
restrained, original music.

If you have not seen
much of Ben Kingsley since Schindler’s List
you’ll note that he is showing his age, his sharp
features flattening out, his role strictly to subordinate
to, and be less impressive than Jim Sturgess.

As scripter, Kari Skogland
turns out a complex plot, the action moving often at
a furious pace. The movie at 117 minutes never overextends
its welcome.

People give all kinds
of excuses for being plump. “It runs in my family;
can’t do anything about it.” “I eat
like a bird: must be fate.” “I exercise
two hours a day; can’t figure it out.” Here’s
a new one: “Hollywood made me do it.” This
last excuse turns out to be true. In Nicolas Winding
Refn’s Bronson, Tom Hardy gains one hundred
pounds to play the title character, a real-life person
who is so muscular—accustomed to doing 2500 pushups
a day in prison—that he looks almost slim. Compared
to Hardy’s gorging, Matt Damon’s seems like
a piece of cake, or several pieces if you will. He gained
thirty pounds for the role of the title character, Mark
Whitacre, in The Informant! (half of which
just may be attributed to his huge rug), a dramatization
of a real-life story. The exclamation point in he title
is used to indicate that the movie is a comedy, a dark
comedy, though.

Soderbergh, could be
called a man of the left. Hisfilm, Erin
Brockovich, dramatized the true life story of
a woman who almost single-handedly brought down a California
power company for polluting the water supply.

The Informant! is
a complex story that demands full audience attention,
as the dialogue comes thick and fast, as do the manipulations
of its chief character and his nemesis, a giant food
corporation named Archer Daniels Midland. As Mark Whitacre,
Damon’s character is the opposite of Carl Allen’s
in Peyton Reed’s Yes Man. Whitacre cannot
tell the truth. He is considered manic depressive, ultimately
using the bipolar defense when indicted for fraud for
taking millions in kickbacks for awarding corporate
contracts. But he considers himself the Guy in the White
Hat, someone who, by blowing the whistle, is intent
on tearing down the company he works for as Vice President,
despite his paycheck of $350,000 a year. Why would he
do this? See the picture to find out.

With his fake moustache,
fake hair, and fake regard for the truth, Whitacre works
out of a Decatur, Illinois office of his agribusiness,
whose main industry is the production of corn. Corn
that is involved in the production of everything from
food for shrimps, to the gunk in your Coca-Cola, to
carrying bags. When he tells his boss that there’s
a mole in the office, he’s telling a partial truth—he
is the mole who has been wired by FBI agent Brian Shepard
(Scott Bakula) to get the goods on ADM for fixing prices
with its large Japanese competitor. The Japanese are
demanding a bribe of ten million dollars to name the
mole.

The chief comedy comes
not only from the dialogue, but from Mark’s inner
life, his fantasies which are not necessarily of the
Walter Mitty variety, but are of the kind that all of
us take part in. When in conference with some executives,
he is thinking about one man’s tie, guessing that
it’s a cheapie that could be picked up two for
a dollar. We’re clued in that this man is not
only intelligent but has a sense of humor, even in labeling
himself “0014” because “I’m
twice as smart as James Bond.” Much of the humor
is mined, as well, by the ways that he drives the FBI
agents nuts with his fantastic tales of a prospective
Japanese takeover of the world’s business. He’s
obviously read his Michael Crichton.

Matt Damon, a Soderbergh
favorite, is in virtually every frame, whether gaining
the confidence of his wife, Ginger Whitacre (Melanie
Lynskey) or telling everyone who listens that he was
adopted by a rich guy after his parents were killed
in a car crash (You lie!). This is likely to be the
actor’s own favorite role, as he’s given
his head by the director to do whatever it is that bipolar
people do, except that he seems never to be depressed.
The Informant! stands out for deliberately
avoiding belly-laughs in favor of the richer, inner
smiles that audience members should get (by paying attention).
Scott Z. Burns’s script is clever, with Peter
Andrews serving behind the camera and Marvin Hamlisch’s
music keeping the mood upbeat.

The Weinstein
Company/ Universal Pictures
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten

The New York Times on
August 3, 2009 had one of its periodic columns, “What
is happiness?” Readers were invited to respond.
More than one blogger stated that happiness is not really
what we seek: what we really want are intense experiences.
Still another responded that being “in the flow”
is the desideratum. Often the closest we get to intense
experiences is in the movie theater, where we vicariously
watch others enjoy overpowering sensations. There’s
much to be said for vicariousness: Quentin Tarantino’s
Inglourious Basterds satisfies us with people
who risk their lives in return for saving others, but
more important for the characters in the film are the
adventures that provide them with the same thrills that
are felt by skydivers, skiers, jockeys, and others who
are living “in the present” and therefore
“in the flow.”

No-one can surpass writer-director
Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) in making
a pop movie like this one. He transforms some frightening
years out of the history books into fantasy. What would
have happened if Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Bormann
were all simultaneously killed? Would that have ended
World War II on the Western front almost immediately?
One Nazi officer seems confident that it would:
Inglourious Basterds finds that man in a major
role of what is really a thoroughly realized ensemble
piece.

The fairy tale—which
includes even a scene that could have come out of Cinderella—opens
on a dairy farmer in occupied France who is being interrogated
by Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi officer
who is too clever by half in a performance that may
well prove to be the year’s best study of a villain.
Landa, who is fluent in German, French, Italian and
English, is living "cinematic" evidence that
a highly educated person is not immune to the racist
ideologies of National Socialism. Questioning the farmer
whom he suspects is hiding Jews, he is so casual and
friendly, chatting amiably while enjoying a glass of
the farmer’s milk, that we in the audience tense
in our seats, knowing that something’s up.

The picture is divided
into chapters, each with a different tone. Tarantino
switches to another part of France where the Basterds—the
name given to them by Nazis who fear and hate them—are
picking off German soldiers and scalping them. The leader,
Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, with a southern mountain
accent that he retains throughout), encourages one of
his team to bash in the heads of the enemy with a baseball
bat, a task that man does lovingly with one Nazi official
who refuses to give information on the whereabouts of
a squadron.

Most of the film finds
Brad Pitt's character in the background with the evil,
scholarly Colonel Landa capturing some of the best scenes
with his playful interrogation of non-Germans, both
those held as captives and those whose company he appears
to enjoy. In a climactic scene, the colonel has a conversation
with Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), who had escaped when
her family was massacred and who, three years later,
is about to pull off the revenge plot of the century.
When the vengeance kicks in, it hits like a Wagnerian
Gotterdammerung.

Brad Pitt, made up (with
a moustache) to look every bit his 43 years, looks like
he’s having fun with his role as a southern Jew,
but Christoph Waltz as the arch villain delivers the
film's standout performance. Melanie Laurent, as the
young woman with vengeance on her mind, performs well
whether trying to trick the colonel or fending off the
unwelcome attentions of a German sniper.

The varied soundtrack
which includes David Bowie’s “Cat People
(Putting Out the Fire),” Bruno Balz’s “Davon
Geht Die Welt Nicht Unter,” and Ray Charles’s
“What’d I Say,” is always relevant
to the several diverse chapters, all filmed with obvious
great expense by Robert Richardson.

Inglourious Basterds
cannot be compared to classics like Schindler’s
List. The movie is strictly melodrama, not tragedy,
but melodrama of the highest sort. Given the numbers
of films dealing with the period in Europe overshadowed
by the Nazi agenda, we can guess that the only thing
millennial about the thousand-year Reich is that movies
will continue being made for a thousand more years about
that period in history. It’s just possible that
as the year 2109 rolls around, Inglourious Basterds
will rank (along with Paul Verhoeven’s Black
Book) as one of cinema’s most refreshingly
imaginative pulp fictions.

There’s a theory
that sounds reasonable, holding that people become optometrists
because they’ve had trouble with their eyes, podiatrists
because their corns were killing them, and psychoanalysts
because they have serious emotional problems of their
own. Why else would someone become interested? In Brandon
Camp’s Love Happens, the principal character
is something like an analyst, but he has a larger following
than most and stands to make a lot more money than the
$300 an hour that New York shrinks charge. He’s
a self-help guru, whose book bears the simple-minded
title A-OKAY. People who read the tome have
the option of joining one of his seminars where they
sit around and speak their minds, trying to exorcise
their demons. Little do the guru’s followers know
that their leader has problems more serious than theirs,
so bad that he is afraid to ride in elevators, opting
to walk thirty-two flights to his room in a Seattle
hotel.

Love Happens
trots out all the clichés of romantic comedy—the
meeting cute, the obstacles that keep the couple apart,
the reconciliation. But even worse, Camp’s pic
puts us in touch with the all the clichés of
weepies, of soaps, with leading persons bawling (yes,
that’s bawling spelled with a “w”
to keep the MPAA happy and give it a PG-13).

To the credit of the
studio, Aaron Eckhart gets top billing in the credits
with Jennifer Aniston settling for second, which is
right considering that the former spends a lot more
time on the screen than she.

This choice might have
been worrisome since Eckhart is not as well known, but
cinephiles have followed his career when he made far
stronger and more original films like In the Company
of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors
before he went for the money, for example by playing
Harvey Dent in The Dark Night. This time around,
he plays a celeb who has just come out with a book entitled
A-OKAY, who is met by large audiences that
virtually worship him, all shouting in reply to his
“How are you?” with “A-OKAY”—which
makes one wonder why they’re there in his seminars.
His character, Burke Ryan, meets cute Eloise (Jennifer
Aniston) in the hotel lobby, and turns her on so much
that she rages against him and his huge ego by following
him into the men’s room to continue her rant before
walking out. When we learn that both Eloise and Burke
have had bad experiences with the opposite sex and “are
not ready for dating,” we can see where this is
all headed.

Sasha Alexander takes
a Joan-Cusack-like role as Eloise’s assistant
in the florist business, John Carroll Lynch is the big,
lumberjack-type of a fellow named Walter who can’t
get over the death of his twelve-year-old son, Dan Fogler
performs in the role of Burke’s rah-rah agent
trying to set his boss up with a mega-deal, and Martin
Sheen is the father-in-law whom Burke tries to avoid
out of his own feelings of guilt. The only thing that
flies in this movie is an adorable white parrot that
repeatedly says “hello.” There had to be
some intelligent dialogue somewhere.

Herrick Entertainment/
Freestyle Releasing
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten

Many a lad or lass when
ordered to report to their English classes about “What
I did on my summer vacation” has bored their peers
even more than their teachers could do. George Devereaux
must have been an exception, largely because of the
vivacious, spunky, albeit sometimes naive southern belle
that was his mother - a mother who took him and his
brother on a road trip that taught him quite a bit more
than his teachers possibly could.

Nor is it likely that
many actors have had such a rich summer vacation: My
One and Only, Richard Loncraine’s biographical
look at the real adolescence of actor George Hamilton
(now seventy years old), is a treat for the audience,
featuring a teen actor whose good looks foreshadow handsome
Mr. Hamilton’s in the latter’s last movie,
Love at First Bite.

Whatever bite the mainstream
My One and Only has may be muted, but the wit
is there thanks to Charlie Peters’s script and
best of all Renee Zellweger, the obvious choice for
the aforementioned southern belle, who carries the story
off beautifully.

The story opens in the
early 1950s as dapper fifteen-year-old George Devereaux
(a character who later in life changes his name to George
Hamilton who is played in the film by Logan Lerman),
offering to buy a Cadillac Eldorado in New York for
cash. Devereaux is pulled aside by the sales associates
who threaten to turn him over to the cops for theft.
Instead George, who proves to be an apt storyteller,
describes how he got the money, launching us into the
story of George’s summer vacation.

What motivates the road
trip? Ann Devereaux (Renee Zellweger) returns early
to her New York apartment to find her bandleader husband,
Dan (Kevin Bacon), in bed with another woman. With little
money, she packs up, takes George and George’s
effeminate brother, Robbie (Mark Rendall) on a journey
to find a husband for herself and stepfather for her
boys. Her road trip, with stops in Boston, Pittsburgh,
St. Louis and L.A., introduce us to an ensemble of potential
mates, including: a martinet of an army officer, Harlan
(Chris Noth), who strikes out when he disciplines the
boys; Charlie Correll (Eric McCormack), already with
a babe on his arm, proving him to be too young for Ann;
paint-store proprietor Bill Massey (David Koechner),
whose man-to-man talk with George deals not with the
birds and the bees but with the fact that women are
either too cold or too warm “so always take a
sweater with you”; and a producer in L.A. who
auditions the two boys, choosing George to perform in
the first movie of his career.

While Zellweger plays
to her signature persona, drinking martinis, smoking,
and tossing off quite a number of witty one-liners (albeit
nothing here with belly laughs), the real star is Logan
Lerman. Lerman's character is more than articulate enough
to hold his own with the adults, his presence shapes
the movie’s core. Lerman, known to an audience
for his role in 3:10 to Yuma and soon to appear
an in the sci-fi Gamer, looks like a young
George Hamilton and is able to captivate one young lass
along with all the story’s grownups.

“I do not like
to do the same things in the same places,” states
the title character to a man who seems intent on killing
him. The same could be said for the actors, though one
wonders why doing the same things is so bad. Think of
Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler; think also of Laura
Linney, one of the most attractive personalities in
Hollywood, who performed in the role of one of the most
famous first ladies in the U.S., Abigail Adams. Richard
Eyre’s The Other Man puts both of these
stars, whose breadth is well known, in a minor soap
about a woman who loves two men. While The Other
Man asks the question, “Can you love two
(maybe more) people at the same time” (which would
knock out the theory that romantic love is like a successful
sperm cell whose contact with an ovum prevents all others
from getting through).

Some of the movie is
worth noting, particularly Haris Zambarloukos’s
photography in Milan and Gemma Jackson’s production
design within an exclusive restaurant. The film is based
on a short story by Bernhard Schlink, about a man who
has a poor relationship with his daughter, Abilgail
(Romola Garai), is slow going, feeling stretched out
by Stephen Warbeck’s soapy music.

The romantic moments
between Lisa and the other man, Ralph (Antonio Banderas),
are not the key element of the tale. Rather some drama
is evoked by a chess game, both literal and figurative,
between the cuckolded husband and the foreign lover—the
latter presenting himself as a Casanova with a bespoke
suit and an occupation that belies his image of material
success. When Peter discovers love emails (love letters
are passé nowadays) between his wife, Lisa (Laura
Linney) and the other man, he, in effect, stalks Ralph
by sending his own emails, pretending to be Lisa. Even
adults learn the tricks of the Internet from the young.

Peter’s meeting
with Ralph in Milan leads to a chess game in which Ralph,
contrary to all common sense, reveals all about his
affair with Lisa. A twist finds Laura Linney out of
the action for most of the film, as the story concludes
on an uninteresting reconciliation between father and
daughter.

To get the negatives
out of the way first… Passing Strange
is a photographed play, one that Spike Lee has filmed,
but which is not opened up cinematically. This limitation
is acute especially considering that the Broadway play,
like it off-Broadway origin, has virtually no set. There
are no graphic looks at Black churches, the Amsterdam
café scene receives no images—though the
bright lights that illuminate the proceedings are impressive.
The play received a Tony for Best Book of a Musical
and was nominated for several other Tony's, Drama Desk,
and other awards groups. As a movie, though, Passing
Strange is less likely to garner awards. On Broadway,
shows typically last for two hours or more. The movie
version goes on without Broadway’s typical 20-minute
intermission but at 135 minutes is still too long.

To repeat a criticism that one hears endlessly from
patrons of Broadway musicals, “There’s nothing
in the show that you can hum.” Whether this is
a valid gripe is anybody’s guess: they don’t
make new musicals the way Rodgers and Hammerstein and
Lerner and Lowe have done. Passing Strange
has an abundance of rock-n-roll, twenty-five in all.
I would challenge you to remember any of them a day
after seeing the movie. Third, some of the characters
play multiple persons, a technique not unknown on the
legitimate stage though almost nonexistent in cinema.
Colman Domingo plays Mr. Franklin, Joop and Mr. Venus;
Chad Goodridge takes on the roles of Rev. Jones, Terry,
Christophe and Hugo; while Rebecca Naomi Jones serves
as Sherry, Renata and Desi.

Yet as in the words of
one repeated song, “It’s all right.”
It’s all right not so much because of Spike Lee’s
direction (credit principally Matthew Libatique, the
photographer) but because the ensemble on the stage
of the New York’s Belasco Theater perform their
roles with perfect timing, synchronizing their speech
and their songs with one another as though parts of
a Swiss watch. And remember that unlike the movies,
stage performers have to memorize huge chunks of words
to fill out a two-hour production, especially difficult
for characters playing multiple roles; film actors may
get along with just a couple of minutes of dialogue
at a time.

In one of the two principal
roles, Stew performs in the role of singing narrator,
a Greek chorus if you will, moving the action forward
with each song as he looks upon himself as Youth, a
young man played by Daniel Breaker. In this semi-autobiographical
tale that opens on Youth as a 14-year-old living in
LA during the 1960s with his single mother (Elsa Davis),
the young man faces an identity crisis before his time.
He does not fit into the kind of world his mother wishes
for him. He is not a believer, and what’s more
cannot find his identity in a church that’s filled
with sacred music. He believes-as did James Baldwin,
whom Mr. Breaker resembles—that Europe is where
it’s at. Traveling to Amsterdam during the 1970s
for sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, he may have found
himself at last. As he begins getting close to a girlfriend,
he’s off again, this time to Berlin where he fits
into a band of anarchists who spout Marxist clap-trap,
but all but run home to their parents during Christmas.
Determined to continue living in Europe, Youth ignores
the pleas of his now-dying mother to return home.

The songs easily take
up half the running time of the production, Stew belting
forth lyrics that illustrate his looking back to his
earlier days, and Daniel Breaker filling in with his
own youthful, idealistic visions. “We Just Had
Sex” is arguably the most delightful tune in the
bunch, “May Day” the most political. Both
Stew and Daniel Breaker are exceptional performers.

Ultimately this is a
photographed play that must be greatly admired and respected
more than enjoyed; but that’s just one critic’s
opinion.

If Alexis Bledel is not
the cutest actress of her generation in Hollywood, she
comes pretty close—not quite up to Evan Rachel
Wood or Amy Adams, but she certainly can be compared
in appearance to Zoe Deschanel. She shares even Zoe’s
expressive eyes, bubbly personality, but not Ms. Deschanel’s
sense of irony. No matter. Bledel carries a movie that
is so feather-light that it could be called Up,
if that title were not already taken. Post Grad
may be a sitcom at heart, but in these troubles economic
times it resonates with “freelancers,” read
“unemployed,” or “between jobs.”
It should resonate especially with college grads who
are frustrated that their four years of study created
$100,000 in student loan debts which may take much longer
to be paid off than they first thought.

Though Post Grad
may evoke smiles from the young audience in its target
range, it has no belly laughs, even given the fact that
Michael Keaton plays the role of the understanding dad.
Keaton's character is only understanding, however, when
it comes to anything but his 22-year-old daughter’s
romantic life.

The story finds Ryden
Malby (Alexis Bledel) at her graduation ceremonies at
the University of California at Irvine. Ryden is beaten
out for the valedictory role by an aggressive young
woman who believes she is entitled to start at the top.
Ryden wants to work at a prestigious L.A. publishing
company, so she rentis an apartment with the assumption
that the job is sewed up, only to find that twenty others
are being interviewed on the same day for the same gig.
Rejected and dejected, she moves back home with her
nutty family, which includes her luggage-store manager
dad, Walter (Michael Keaton), her welcoming mother,
Carmella (Jane Lynch), her weird little brother, Hunter
(Bobby Coleman), and her grandmother, Maureen (Carol
Burnett), who is preparing for her own funeral by pricing
coffins. Ryden also has her lapdog-like best friend,
Adam (Zach Gilford) who wants to be more than just a
friend. But Adam's romantic interest is quashed when
Ryden becomes infatuated with the next-door-neighbor,
David Santiago (Rodrigo Santoro), a much older Brazilian
who has been trying unsuccessfully to produce commercials.

Director Vicky Jenson
moves the plot along at almost breakneck speed, fit
for the attention-deficit crowd that will form the bulk
of the audience. The one embarrassing role is inhabited
by Carol Burnett, the stereotypical hip grandma, who
comes out with aphorisms like “condoms are your
best friend.” As the kid brother, Bobby Coleman
plays a character who can be a pain in the butt, but
who will hopefully outgrow his weirdness.

Post Grad, then,
is an antidote if your movies diet is filled with indies.
It’s nicely photographed by Charles Minsky with
an ending that’s predictable and yet not at all
credible.

Before my old nabe, Boro
Park, Brooklyn, became the home of a great many ultra-religious
Hasidim, the vicinity housed a mostly Jewish population
of all stripes. Orthodox lived side by side with Reform,
Conservatives brushed shoulders with secular. Most secular
Jews at the time, though, identified themselves as Reform,
attending synagogue on High Holy Days but not likely
to keep Kosher households. We all had a grounding in
the rituals of Judaism. These themes of divisions within
the Jewish community and to an extent between Jews and
those of other faiths, is given a touching treatment
in Sam Garbarski’s The Rashevski Tango.
The title comes from a line from a departed grandmother
who once said that to be happy you’ve got to dance
the tango.

Three generations of
a Belgian family are considered in the film, sometimes
in separate segments as though each were part of a different
film, other times as they interact with one another.
One generation is represented by twenty-something Nina
(Tania Gabarski), who is courted by a gentile lawyer,
Antoine (Hippolyte Giradot), who despite a couple of
rolls in the hay is given little chance for a permanent
union by a woman who wants a Jewish husband. Ric (Rudi
Rosenberg), a grandson of Rosa whose funeral the clan
attended, was once a soldier in the Israeli army but
is now in love with Khadija (Selma Kouchy), a Muslim.
The middle generation finds Simon (Michel Jonasz) as
a shoe salesman whose wife Isabelle (Ludmila Mikael)
is Gentile. The departed Rosa’s former husband
had left his family to become an Orthodox rabbi in Israel;
he refuses to return to Begium. As old Dolfo, Natan
Cogan frames the production as a man who does not want
to talk about “the camps” and whose emotional
acceptance of those whose religious grounding is different
from his own presumably mimics the writer-director’s
own views.

Essentially, Garbarski,
(whose 2007 film Irina Palm 2007 tells the
story of a fifty-year-old widow who is still faithful
to her departed husband and who needs money to pay for
treatment for her sick grandson), patiently turns out
his characters who in one way or another deal with the
question, “Who is a Jew?” The answer is
a complex one. For example, when the fortyish lawyer
goes to a liberal rabbi to convert and thereby be acceptable
to his 27-year-old would-by lover, he is told that Orthodox
Jewry would not recognize the conversion. Strangely
enough, he opts to reject Reform Judaism in favor of
converting with an Orthodox rabbi, while Nina is herself
not recognized as Jewish since only her father was born
into that faith.

The Rashevski Tango
will be considered depressing by some viewers with all
its talk, even by people with decades of life to go,
about where they want to be buried or even whether they
would accept cremation. There are passages of warm humor
to counter the sadness, all put together by director
Garbarski in a neat Belgian package with a sentimental
twist at the very conclusion.

Jackie Mason once asked
his audience, “When does a Jewish fetus become
a human being?” Without waiting for an answer
he responded, “When he graduates from medical
school.”

Jewish tradition considers
the practice of medicine to be the highest calling for
a human being. A doctor saves lives while supporting
his or her family well. Judging by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s
Still Walking, at least one elderly Japanese
fellow would agree. When this father notes that one
of his sons became a doctor while the other is floundering
around in the unsteady industry of art restoration,
preferences become pronounced, sibling rivalry is introduced,
and family happiness turns to dysfunction.

Mr. Kore-eda, who wrote
the screenplay from his original story, unfolds a gentle
drama of family reunion, one lasting just twenty-four
hours and all taking place within the home of an aging
retired physician, Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), who is neither
happy in his newly-found leisure nor pleased by the
marriage of his 40-something son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe).
Wanting to keep his unemployment status from the family,
Ryota makes a rare visit to the patriarchal household,
bringing his wife, Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) and his ten-year-old
stepson (Shohei Tanaka). Yukari is none too comfortable
during the visit, receiving a cold shoulder from her
husband’s father, who believes that his handsome
son did not have to “settle” for a widow,
and from her mother-in-law, Tishiko (Kirin Kiki), who
is disappointed that the couple have not produced a
grandchild for her. As Tishiko peels vegetables in the
kitchen with the help of her high-spirited daughter,
Chinami (pop-star You), we in the audience get the impression
that the brief get-together will be joyous, or at the
very least banal. But when the 68-year-old old Kyohei
summons up the memory of his other son, Junpei, a doctor
who drowned fifteen years earlier, and when Kyohei’s
wife invites a plump 25-year-old who was the cause of
Junpei's death when Junpei tried to rescue him from
drowning, the stage is set for harsh recriminations.

To say that director
Kor-eda never allows his character to step over the
border into melodrama would be the day’s leading
understatement. The film is more Chekhov than Jerry
Bruckheimer, seeking to cast a spell over us in the
audience. This is not to say that the film is for everyone,
as it’s the polar opposite of Terminator
type films. Those who will most appreciate Kore-eda’s
work might be the people among us who have had their
own experiences with family dysfunction (don’t
bother raising your hand if you meet this requirement).
Just imagine what Holly Hunter and Robert Downey Jr.
(Home for the Holidays) would do with the screenplay
and with a director like Jodie Foster—which may
be, by the way, why many Japanese prefer Hollywood movies
to works of their own arty directors.

For his part Kirokazu
Kore-eda has done bolder family dramas like Nobody
Knows (a reckless mother movies into a small apartment
with her 12-year-old son and the boy’s siblings
hidden in her luggage), and After Life (dead
people spend a week with dead counselors who help each
of them to carry a memory through eternity).

Theater scholars will note that if Still Walking
were on the stage, the story would meet the Aristotelian
requirements: a single location, a single day, a single
plot.

Photographer Yutaka Yamazaki should get money from the
Yokohama Tourist Department for affording us a crisp,
picture-perfect view of Japan’s leading harbor
town.

The film’s conclusion is a well-placed commentary
of the life cycle. Parents die, new children are born,
and sometimes a dead person can come back to Japan as
a butterfly.

Though not the grooviest
display of the seminal 1969 weekend that featured a
half million participants frolicking at a muddy concert,
Taking Woodstock is not a bummer either. Nor
can we call this film a departure for Ang Lee, whose
Brokeback Mountain dealt with the homosexual
relationship of two cowboys, and whose The Ice Storm
dealt with casual sex in a Connecticut suburb. Still
it’s difficult to say that the sexual themes in
those films, both dealing with personal stories on a
small plane, is much like the coming-out-of-closet aspect
of Taking Woodstock. After all the Woodstock
concert, which actually took place in New York’s
Catskill Mountain town of White Lake, was huge. Ang
Lee’s movie does attempt to bring out the idea
of the weekend’s dimensions, but at most he somehow
relies on a couple of hundred extras to afford the viewer
the dimensions of the event.

Taking Woodstock
is primarily a personal story, revolving around the
relationships of a young gay man who works as an interior
designer in New York’s Greenwich Village, but
travels to White Lake to try to save his parents’
crumbling resort, El Monaco, from foreclosure. As Elliot
Teichberg, Demitry Martin, known to his cable followers
as a comedian, carries the project on his back, or more
accurately on his long (prosthetic?) nose. His mother,
Sonia Teichberg (Imelda Staunton), had left Europe during
the era of National Socialism and worries that everyone
around her—in one instance the banker holding
the mortgage-- is persecuting her for being Jewish.
His dad, Jake (Henry Goodman—who like Imelda Staunton
is a British actor), puts up with his wife’s rages,
a quiet fellow whose laid-back appearance belies his
torment.

When Elliot, with the
help of producer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), organizes
a music and arts festival with the hope of taking in
enough money to pay off the mortgage, he had no idea
how many hippies would turn up after landowner-neighbor
Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) rents out his 600-acre dairy
farm. Nor did it hurt to have the services of ex-Marine
Vilma (Liev Schreiber), dressed in drag, to act as security,
driving off a couple of the local mobsters who demanded
protection money.

This Focus Features production
is anything but focused, a sprawling enterprise that
might remind cinephiles of the works of Robert Altman.
One incident follows another. In one key scene, Elliott,
who is transformed by the experience of this single
weekend, samples acid from two stoned hippies (Paul
Dano and Kelli Garner), a trip that turns the movie
screen into a psychedelic vision.

A major problem is that
Demetri Martin, somewhat like Dustin Hoffman in The
Graduate, looks so constipated even when he publicly
comes out of the closet by kissing a construction worker,
the scene never becomes electric. The concert itself
looks mostly like a side piece, an excuse for youths
to tell their parents that they were going to a concert
when actually they sought a weekend of nudity, sex and
drugs.

Ultimately, Taking
Woodstock is a trip down memory lane commemorating
the fortieth anniversary of the August 1969 concert.
Watching the movie may not seem as exciting as being
there, but then again we’re sitting in comfortable
air conditioned surroundings, most of us leaving the
theater nice and clean.

New Line Cinema/Warner Bros
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten

When Frank Sinatra sings “Gee,
it’s great to be traveling,” his listeners
are doubtless nodding their heads.Then again, they say
no matter where you are, you are always with yourself—which
can make for disappointing moments while you’re
in another country. The husband in The Time Traveler’s
Wife, Henry (Eric Bana), is a case study of being
always with himself when he travels, a fate which makes
him wonder why he can turn up anywhere at any time even
though he never bought an airline ticket. His is a fate
that can make for cheap tourism, but since he cannot control
his trips, and since he arrives at his destinations without
clothes or money, you can’t blame him for wanting
to be a stay-at-home fellow.

The Time Traveler’s Wife
is less within the sci-fi genre than it is a three-hanky
chick-flick. That’s not a bad thing, especially
if the director and writer were to wink at the audience,
but Mr. Schwentke sends the charming couple into their
fragile lives without more than a dollop of humor. “I
met her father, and he’s a Republican and a hunter,”
remarks Henry to his alcoholic dad, Richard De Tamble
(Arliss Howard)—to which dad makes a predictably
sour face.

The movie opens with a bang as six-year-old
Henry, sitting in the back seat of the car driven by his
opera-singing mother (Michelle Nolden), is involved in
a crash that kills his mother. He is saved because just
at the instant of impact he is transported to a time a
few minutes earlier, where he meets himself as a thirty-something
man who assures the kid that everything will turn out
OK. Ultimately Henry’s key relationship is not with
his mother or his younger self but with the love of his
life, Clare (Rachel McAdams), whom he meets in the library
where Henry works. But before you can say “Shazam,”
Henry is transported to a meadow where he attempts to
tell Clare, now six years old (Brooklynn Proulx), that
he’s a friend. Little does little Clare know that
marriage with the naked man (Henry time travels without
clothes) is inevitable.

Time travel is used not so much for
supernatural effects than as a model describing a love
affair that must be strong enough to allow its survival
while the man of the house is seldom at home. The chemistry
between Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana is there, all right,
and their characters do not have to worry about money
since Henry can, and does, win a 5 million dollar lottery
by cheating. But their love is so powerful that Henry
would do anything to be normal and not subject to a genetic
anomaly that will work its way through the next generation,
should he and his wife have a child.

Florian Ballhaus’s photography
in Toronto across various seasons is picture-pretty, and
McAdams and Bana are about as handsome a couple as we
can expect in Hollywood movies. The film does not make
much sense, even if we in the audience suspend disbelief,
and there are moments of unintentional laughter in a work
that is sadly lacking in whimsy or internal logic. The
Time Traveler’s Wife, both as Audrey Niffenegger’s
best-selling novel and now a Warner Bros./New Line release,
should make a big hit with women, and might just appeal
to those men who happened to like Julie & Julia as
well.